No easy answers to nation's student dropout problem

We heard a common theme. Dropouts are a national crisis, the problem is not something schools are responsible for entirely, nor is it something they can fix entirely.

And, as I learned in St. Louis, there are no easy answers.

After the touring the Big Picture at Kottmeyer school, the education writers attending the Hechinger Institute seminar settled in to hear experts from across the country discuss issues surrounding dropouts and high school reform.

Judy Codding, president and CEO of America's Choice, told us that American schools were considered the best in the world for so long that they became complacent.

Now her group, which is kind of a national think tank for school reform, seeks to set them back on track.

Codding said two out of 10 students who leave middle school are not ready for a rigorous high school curriculum, and that teachers indicate that they spend a quarter to a third of their time each year reteaching what students should have learned in earlier grades.

That poses a problem once these students graduate, since about a quarter of first-year college students and close to half of community college students do not return for a second year.

Codding said the public doesn't understand how the schools are failing, and that there is not sense of urgency to improve them.

She was followed by Robert Balfanz, research scientist for the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University. His work to identify "dropout factories" last year created a firestorm across the country and here in Grand Rapids.

Balfanz said there are four types of dropouts.

1) Students who leave because of something that happened outside of school, such as becoming pregnant, getting arrested or going to work to support their family.

2) "Fade outs," students who have been promoted on time, but have become bored or frustrated and stop seeing the reason to come to school.

3) "Push outs," students who are perceived to be difficult or dangerous and are subtly or not so subtly encouraged to withdraw.

4) Students who fail to succeed in school and attend schools that fail to provide them with the environments and supports they need to succeed. They leave after years of falling behind and think that success is impossible.

Balfanz said many of the students who are going to drop out can be identified years before. He said school should start looking at attendance patterns as early as sixth grade.

Also, concentrated poverty pulls students away. He said males are drawn into gangs, and girls often provide cheap daycare for their families.

Balfanz said there are ways to beat the problem, and there are many success stories. But the trick is to recreate the successful programs on a larger scale.

But part of the problem is that there are conflicting positions about what high schools are supposed to be, and that debate has raged since the turn of the century -- make that the previous turn of the century.

University of Michigan Professor Jeff Mirel took us back to 1893, when a group called "The Committee of Ten" comprised mostly of university presidents decided that every student should follow a college preparatory curriculum.

That lasted until 1918, when the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education suggested large changes, coming up with a track system that would place one group of students on a path for college, one for business skills, a third building vocational skills and a fourth to provide only a general education.

That phase lasted for decades, until the National Commission on Excellence in Education produced the landmark report "A Nation at Risk" that sparked a renewed push for academic excellence, especially in math and science.

The recent change in Michigan's graduation requirements -- which have every student taking a college-bound curriculum -- show how educational thinking has come full circle on just over a century.